Henry David Thoreau Quotes

There can be no truce between science and religion.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

Life is never free of contradictions.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Mercy and anger do not go together.

Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.

Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

INCOMPATIBILITY, n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination. Incompatibility may, however, consist of a meek-eyed matron living just around the corner. It has even been known to wear a moustache.

There are two kinds of jokes - funny jokes and Jack Benny jokes.

In the United States, I am often addressed as a doctor. I should like to point out, however, that I am not such and shall never think of becoming one.

Dean's wife, Judith Steinberg, made a rare appearance with Dean. She's a doctor, so I guess they brought her in to stop the hemorrhaging.

Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature: delight hath a joy in it either permanent or present; laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

So I watched the Pink Panther last night, and so I'm trying desperately to be funny, and then it's just not working out so good... I wonder if maybe I could've been a comedian or something like that, or maybe I could've been a doctor, then I wouldn't have to make anyone laugh.

Such is the nature of the marriage relation that a breach once made cannot be healed, and it is the height of folly to waste one's life in vain efforts to make a binary compound of two diverse elements. What would we think of the chemist who should sit twenty years trying to mix oil and water, and insist upon it that his happiness depended upon the result of the experiment?

So Stephanie.. you wanna say let the bodies hit the floor... I would say... let the boobies hit the floor!

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic